Their biographies and personal histories include a writer born in a dirt floor bohío, who received a PHD from Harvard and published her first book in 1993, When I was Puerto Rican, a memoir where she ponders about her national identity.  Today she is a college professor and writes from a new space, a community in the state of New York where she works with battered women and where she finished her second book, a novel, America’s Dream in 1996.  Esmeralda Santiago came north, the child of an immigrant mother and learned to speak English as a second language.   Like Nicholassa Mohr, she gives testimony of the consequences of Puerto Rican emigration in our girls and women.  (One of the largest of the 20^th century: 2.7 million Puerto Ricans live in the United States).

Nicholassa Mohr’s short story, “Aunt Rosanna’s Rocker” (1985) is probably the best and most moving reflection about what it means to be a woman in Latino culture.

Then we encounter the sugar cane plantation aristocrats who date back to the 19^th century in the person of Olga Nolla (1938 – 2002), author of the story “No Dust is Allowed in this House”.

The youngest of the group, Mayra Santos Febres was born in 1966 and burst into the Puerto Rican literary scene in 1991 with two books of poetry:  Anamú y Manigua  and El orden escapado and has been rattling the patriarchal establishment since.

In spite of different socioeconomic backgrounds and personal histories, these defiant voices take their characters in a journey from the utmost silence to the ultimate cry in an attempt to understand who we are and what is ours in order to assume our own identities, construct a self image, and transform the patriarchal heritage of slavery and colonialism into a literary corpus that consciously and consistently reclaims nature, history and above all language.

These Puerto Rican contemporary writers live in the island, in the United States, or in a permanent transcultural transit.  But whether they communicate in English or Spanish, language is always at the service of autonomy and liberation, always opposed to marginalization and alienation.

Their texts share a central focus from which all its variations can be understood; they attempt to reaffirm the feminine while describing, with the purpose of denouncing, what has meant and still means to be a woman in the “disenchanted island”.

Acquiring cultural understanding is one of the goals of foreign language studies.  This a valid premise for those who start learning a second language and also for students at advanced levels.  To know a language is to understand the vision of the world that community of speakers has.

In order to illustrate this I will relate an anecdote.  One of my classes was reading a short story by the Cuban, Senel Paz.   You probably know him from the movie, “Strawberries and Chocolate”.  The story recounts the first sexual encounter of a young couple.  Before the encounter, the male character’s best friends give him a piece of advice on how to behave, and the advice is the title of the story: “No le digas que la quieres”, “Do Not Tell Her That You Love Her”.

My students could not understand what originated the advice.  If the young man was in love, why not tell her?  This had never happened with my Puerto Rican students; they knew very well what originates the comment.

Machismo and Marianismo are the elements that define and characterize the socialization process of male-female dynamics in the Spanish speaking Antilles.

That phrase, do not tell her that you love her, and many other in circulation illustrate what Rosario Castellanos proposed more than 30 years ago:  “Man does not see in a woman someone made of flesh and bone… nor do they perceive in her the qualities of a person that equals them in dignity… they only see the incarnation of some fundamental antagonic principle, generally of malignant nature”  In other words, the protagonists’ friend thinks, because he has been taught to do so throughout his process of socialization, that women are not to be trusted.  Still the most interesting thing of all is, that in all certainty, it was a woman who educated him in the subtleties of machismo, the same way that she educated her daughters to be marianistas.

So much has been written about "machismo” that the concept has become synonymous of oppressive male supremacy.  Yet, little is known about its counterpart, marianismo.  Evelyn P. Stevens used the term for the first time in 1973 describing it this way:  “No sacrifice is excessive for a Latin American woman.  There is no limit to her enormous capacity for patience with the men in her life, marianismo has received a great deal of support form women.  This makes it possible to see marianismo as part of a mutual agreement, the other half of machismo.”

If machismo is the social behavior that men learn and are expected to act out, then marianismo defines the role women must play; a very difficult one because its role model is the Virgin Mary.

This explains the title of an essay by another Puerto Rican writer, Magali Garcia Ramis:  “No queremos a la virgen”, “ We do no want the Virgin Mary”.  She says in her essay: “All the glory, all the heroics, the authors of the Gospels, all those who spread the word of God and helped create the church, the twelve apostles were men.  And we got as a role model a suffering mother, struck with grief and raised into heaven without having died, without retuning to earth, so ethereal, virginal in the most absolute of ways, not part of life, time or reality.  Because of this and because we are very honored to be made of flesh and bone, we can no longer want the Virgin.”  

Marianismo is synonymous to sacred duty, self-denial and chastity.  It means to give care and pleasure but to receive neither; to live in the shadow, and not metaphorically, of the men in her life, whether they may be her father, brother, boyfriend, husband or sons.  With the exception of bearing children, the marianista is much like a nun in a convent, only that her religious order is marriage and her lover is not Christ, but an imperfect man to whom she devotes all her life.

And, what is the reward for totally capitulating her self identity?  A mirage of power and respect that the role of wife and mother confer her; attributes that a divorced woman looses immediately, in spite of the fact that out of every two marriages, one ends in divorce in Puerto Rico.

This form of capitulation perpetuates a system of values that equates submission to perfection.  To nobly sacrifice oneself – greatest expression of Marianismo – is the force that has, for generations, stopped Puerto Rican women from even considering the subject of their own personal worth, in spite of the fact that we can vote since 1936 and half the college population of the island are women.

Mothers, grandmothers and aunts, ironically, have passed on submission, as law.  This is the case of the protagonist of the short story “Aunt Rosana’s Rocker” by Nicholassa Mohr. 

The conflict is presented in the context of Casto’s and Zoraida’s marriage.  After nine years of marriage, three living children, one stillborn, and a few miscarriages, because Casto believes in the rhythm as the only method of contraception, Zoraida, the wife has nocturnal episodes of sexual bliss to her husband’s absolute amazement:  In this passage the narrator describes how the husband perceives them:  “ It was bizarre and, unless one actually saw her, he explained, it was truly beyond belief.  Her actions were lewd and vulgar, and if they were sexual, as it seemed, then this was not the kind of sex a decent husband and wife engage in.  What was even harder for him to bar was her enjoyment.”  Never in all her years of marriage had she ever uttered such sounds – he shook his head – or shown any passion or much interest in doing it.”

This nocturnal behavior of Zoraidas’ contrasts her submissiveness during the day.  Fray Luis de Leon would not have been able to describe it better in his 16 th century book of advice for married women,  “La perfecta casada”.

The narrator of the story continues:  “ And to make matters more complicated, the next day, Zoraida seemed to remember nothing.  In fact, during the day, she was her normal self again…  She remained a wonderful housekeeper and devoted mother.  Supper was served on time, chores were done without fuss, the apartment was immaculate, and the kids were attended to without any problems.”

Repressing self-expression is built into Zoraida trough fear early on in her life.   The fear of transgressing social expectations carries powerful sanctions.  Girls are educated for passivity and are surrounded with prohibitions that result in shyness and self-denial.

The short story is a shocking family reunion in which Zoraida’s parents and in laws discuss the intimacies of her marriage at her husband’s request, and even more so for its resolution.  The family council decides that it is necessary to remove from the house the object that they deem responsible for the marital discord.  Aunt Rosanna’s rocker where Zoraida sits, in a trance, every time her husband claims his bed rights.

It is then when, with the rocker under her arm, Zoraida’s mother gives the final fatal piece of Marianista advice: “Mira, mi hija, I better talk to you.’  She stood close to Zoraida and began in a friendly manner, keeping her voice low. ‘ You have to humor men; you must know that by now.  After all, you are no longer a little girl.  All women go through this difficulty, eh?  You are not the only one.  Why, do you know how many times your father wants…well, you know, wants it?  But I, that is, if I don’t want to do it, well, I find a way not to.  But diplomatically, you know?”  All right, he’s older now and he bothers me less; still, what I mean is, you have to learn that men are like babies and they feel rejected unless you handle the situation just right.”

In the meantime, Zoraida washes the dishes and meditates: “ They were going to take away the rocker.  She has always had it, ever since she could remember.   As a little girl, Zoraida used to rub her hands against the caning and woodwork admiringly, while she rocked, dreamed and pretended to her heart’s content,  Lately it had become the one place  where she felt she could be herself, where she could really be free.”

Imagining takes Zoraida to a greater state of oppression.  Faced with the resolution her entire family gives to her “ so called problem”, she does not react by reaffirming herself overtly.  She tries to safeguard her authenticity and dignity as a human being with a form of behavior that is more like an incursion, if not an escape, to another level of consciousness where she hides from the predominant patriarchal mores.

The story denounces the contradictions and frustrations of Hispanic women’s lives.  Contradictions that are not exclusive to any generation, profession or social class; no woman escapes them.

This is what the protagonist of the short story “No Dust is Allowed in this House” discovers to her own dismay.  The author, Olga Nolla, recreates the oppressive and decadent way of life of the sugar cane oligarchy to present the tragic condition of the women of this class.  Listen to how a parasol, an improbably apt narrator of the story, describes this woman as she takes a walk through what she believes to be “her house”:  “ …Doña Inés is the eye that guarantees that each day all the pieces of the puzzle will fall into place and remains watchful even as she sits on the porch to listen to the sea, even as she sleeps she knows everything that goes on in the house …” She is as Virginia Woolf said “the fairy godmother that watches over the home”.

In the story, the protagonist, doña Inés, unsuccessfully defends her rule over the house, the only place where she maintains a semblance of power, from what the master, her husband, decides.  Tension grows and reaches its culmination when she refuses to obey her husband and defiantly opposes the construction of a wall that would sever her communication with the impoverished families that surround their property.

Doña Inés expressed her position in defiant terms:  “ she stood squarely before him, and raising her voice, something unheard of in her, she declared she did not want to hear another word about it, that it had been settled and the answer was no, no, so there, over her dead body, staring defiantly at her husband, saying that she was in charge here, that he was not to interfere in household matters, … in her territory, the house, in this house I am in charge, she said, …”

The husband prevails; the wall is built while doña Inés goes on a trip to Europe with her daughters and her husband’s insistence.  The parasol reflects on the master’s shrewdness:  “ …if doña Inés was the queen of the house, it was because he allowed her to be,…

Upon realizing her true place in the household, Doña Inés expresses her indignation by destroying the wall in an act of the imagination that underlines her impotence. By building the wall, the patriarch interrupts communication, something that never existed between them.  The wall just makes the inequality palpable.

Inequality determines and defines the life of 52% of the population of Puerto Rico.  The population of the island is over 3 and a half million, half of which are women.  Women have a longer life expectancy rate than men.  65% of college graduates in the country are women yet men with a college degree earn 30% more than their female counterparts.   53% of the homes in Puerto Rico have a woman as head of household and 73 % live under the levels of poverty because the average income of a woman 18 years old or older with a bachelor’s degree is $11,500.00.  Children live in 64% of these homes.  And the first cause of death of women between the ages of 20 to 39 is AIDS, 53% have contracted the illness through heterosexual contact.    

Maybe these statistics from the Report on the Status of Women presented at the IV Conference on Women that took place in Beijing in September of 1995 will help us explain and understand the character of America, the protagonist of Esmeralda’s Santiago second book.

América’s Dream is not the dream of a maid from Puerto Rican TV situation comedies who became, in real life, a prominent senator; instead it is the nightmare of so many women that we have known, appreciated and loved all our lives.  We know the stories well:  it is the poor grandmother who raised her grandchildren because her daughter died from AIDS.  Her partner was a drug addict and gave her the disease because “ a real macho does not use condoms, it’s too much trouble and it takes away all the pleasure”; or the well to do grandmother who is also raising the grandkids because the husband hammered her daughter to death and since he was a famous basketball player, he was out on parole doing community work with children in basketball clinics.  It may be the cook at the well to do private school who visits her son in jail every Sunday because as he recounts:  “that bitch is not going to laugh at me anymore, I stalked her and that day I saw her in the car with the other guy, the one from La Republica Dominicana, I rammed their car with my4 x 4 and she and my little daughter died right then and there.  Yes, my little girl was sitting on her lap.  That’s why I say, it was all her fault.”

These anecdotes, taken at random from the countries’ newspapers, are as real as they are a grotesque account of the lives of thousands of Puerto Rican women of all ages.

What draws our attention to América’s Dream, Esmeralda Santiago’s second book is that she brings to her text a life story that the reader knows too well. 

The protagonist’s daughter runs away with her boyfriend at sixteen, not really knowing why; but since her mother, América and her grandmother, did the same thing at the same age, why should not she. Dreams of a daughter that does not relive her mistakes are lost early on in América’s Dream. 

The central character is in the center of the storm, 30 years old and mothering yet another woman who is reluctant to be mothered because, by virtue of having slept with a man, she considers herself to be an adult, with all the privileges and none of the responsibilities.

Fear, violence, verbal psychological and physical abuse define América’s life trajectory.  “ Women should be stuck with an open hand, because if it is done with the fist, well, then that is abuse.  And it should be done once in a while, so that they learn respect” is wisely said by one of the male characters of the novel.

More than 50 years ago, Nemesio Canales, one of our foremost essayists wrote something that is still pertinent today when there is only one Center to aid rape victims in a country where 6,000 to 9,000 are raped every year.  This is what he said then: “Puerto Rican society looks at the violent death of a woman with the same indulgent mixture of curiosity and indifference as they do to the violent death of a chicken.”

Death is the price that América almost pays for escaping the chaos of her life to start anew in the United States:  “To her the scar is not invisible.  It irritates her when pretend it is not there.  It is a reminder of who she is now, and who she was then.  America wears the scar he lover left behind the way a lieutenant wears his stripes.  They are there to remind her that she fought for her life, and that, no matter how others may interpret it, she has a right to live that life as she chooses.  It is, after all, her life, and she is the one in the middle of it.”

Our last author completes the journey that began with silence and ends with her roar.  Mayra Santos short story, “Marina y su olor”, “Marina’s smell” feels as if brought to life from an Afro-Antillean poem.  Proud of her race, defiant and sensual, Marina conjures smells to attract or reject all that surrounds her.  “Since she was eight until she was thirteen, Marina would expel sweet, salty saucy smells through every pore of her body.  And, while being wrapped in her own smell, she did not realize that with them she was able to bewitch every passer by.”

The author confronts us with the ancestral prejudice regarding the odor, not the smells, of blacks.  These references are fundamental to the main character; they are a defiant challenge to the reader and a reaffirmation of her identity.

It seems that Marina has not internalized the Marianist’s Decalogue.  She chooses who is going to be her partner, and she chooses well; she gives new life to her mother’s old diner and reaches her middle years smelling like pure satisfaction.  Thus starts the story:  “Dona Marina Paris was an enchanting woman.  At the age of 49 she still exuded those smells that left men in a trance hoping to get near her to lick her flesh in order to determine if she tasted as good as she smelled.  And every day she smelled like something different. …, but most of the time she smelled like sheer satisfaction.”

All these women, fictional characters, Zoraida, doña Inés, América and Marina overcame their upbringing, or perhaps their indoctrination processes.  The truth of the matter is that one way or another they followed Virginia Woolf’s advice: they refused to be the mirrors that reflect a man so that he may see himself double in size.